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David Coldrick's Weblog

Ubuntu (Feisty) and Toshiba Tecra M5

Just inherited a new laptop at work, a Tosh Tecra M5. Nice box, Core 2 Duo (T2600) with 2 GB ram, so it moves quite well. Never had a Tosh before, I'm impressed with the tools (for windoze only, blech!) that come with it.

Unfortunately, it has Intel "Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML" integrated graphics subsystem, rather than a nice hot nVidia or ATI card. Having finely honed my xorg.conf file to nicely support external monitors/ projectors for presentations with my Inspiron 9300, I'm unhappy about seemingly having to return to square one with my Ubuntu installation.

I installed the current development build (Fiesty Fawn), which went in quite cleanly - most impressed with the WiFi just working out of the box - but xorg is a problem. The driver supplied by the installation is i810. First of all, the only resolution available was 1280x1024 (standard res for the LCD is 1400x1050). So I installed the 915resolution package, and configured it for 1400x1050. That works OK, now I have a choice of resolutions, 1400x1050 and 1280x1024. Unfortunately, most projectors need 1024x768, and I can't figure out what magic is needed to include that in the options available. Certainly just listing 1024x768 in Modes isn't enough.

In addition, even if I do get that accomplished, I dunno how to direct output to an external monitor, given that I no longer have nVidia's TwinView to use.

Very frustrating. This graphics area is the black hole of Linux on a laptop, IMO. Or maybe this 'flu I have has gone to my brain. Sigh.

Try the modesetting driver (there's a version of it in the feisty repo already), or enjoy the hopefully short wait for the xrandr 1.2 stuff to land, which will make all of this pain go away. Particularly on the lovely Intel chipsets, which have Open Source drivers.
Plus, all of this will land in Open Solaris at some stage, so you could run Open Solaris on it too. ;-)

That would be cool. However, I tried the modesetting driver already, and X quietly did not come up. Bummer.
BTW, didn't realise until I went to your blog that FLOSS weekly was back. Great!
Regards,
David

I bought the Tecra M5 a few months ago (before Vista came out), and customizable through the toshiba website...
I got it with the nVidia Quadro 128 MB card internal...very nice I must say.
You CAN get it with the card, I just can't find the customizing link on the Toshiba page anymore...
Here's the google cache for the page I customized from.

I just wonder if you could do a bit of benchmarking with http://www.geekpatrol.ca/2006/07/geekbench-2006/
I'm facing rather inferior performance of linux (ubuntu feisty or fedora core 6) compared to the pre-installed winxp.
According to that benchmark i'm getting following results:
Linux overall score: cca. 100
WinXP overall score: cca. 200
And this bugs me pretty much. I need to find out if it's a problem with my piece of HW only or if there is a special "deccelerator" in the Toshiba laptop to slow down any non-windows OS